How to Change Default Search Engine in Mozilla Firefox

Usually what happens when you type in a word or phrase in the location bar of the Mozilla Firefox browser, is that Firefox searches Google for that word or phrase. For example, if you type ivy bridge in the location bar and press Enter key, Firefox would search Google for ivy bridge and show you the Google search results page for this keyword. Firefox uses Google as its default search engine, but if you want to use some other search engine as your default search engine then it can be done easily. This is how :

Open your Mozilla Firefox web browser and type about:config in the address bar.

Click on the I’ll be careful, I promise! button to continue.

You would see a big list of Firefox configuration entries. Type defaultenginename in the Search field to narrow down the list only to defaultenginename related configuration entries. You would be able to find an entry named browser.search.defaultenginename.

Double-click on browser.search.defaultenginename entry to modify its value. In the dialog box that appears you can type the short name of a search engine like Yahoo or Bing. To know which search engine names you can type, click on the search bar in the top-right corner of the Firefox window. You would see a dropdown listbox showing which search engines you can use as shown in the following picture.

Finally, click on the OK button to save the changes made. You would see the changes take effect immediately.

You can use only those search engines which you have added to your Firefox browser’s search bar. If you want to use a search engine not listed in the search bar, then you can follow instructions in this article to know how to add new search engines to Firefox’s search bar.

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as of yesterday firefox browser (ver 31.0.0.5310) forced bing as the defalt search engine, even after bing is REMOVED from the list of avail search engines.
The browser will NOT accept a change to the search engin in about:config
Manual changing the actual search engin to one listed, on close then reopen the browser it has been set back to bing search engine, again bing is not even listed as an available choise.